The Last Possibility
by Yiroma
Summary: HP/Dr Who. After discovering what looks like an ordinary pocket watch, Harry finds himself drastically changed. Chapter 3/7.
1. The Evans Family

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Harry Potter or Doctor Who. Nor do I make a profit from it. That said, enjoy the story anyway.  
SUMMARY: HP/Dr Who. After discovering what looks like an ordinary pocket watch, Harry finds himself drastically changed. Now he is being chased across time and space by an organisation that will do anything to prevent him from reaching someone called the Doctor...

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1: The Evans Family

Her name was Rosie Doe, and she turned up outside Oxford University unannounced one day in 1948 with only a pocket watch and a small cardboard box. She didn't have an appointment, but she managed to convince the Scientific Panel to give her an interview anyway.

For her interview, she walked in front of the panel and emptied the contents of the box onto the floor. They looked like bits of junk and, when asked, Rosie said that they had indeed come from a junk yard. She then sat down on the floor in front of them, completely ignoring the chair, and began to put the junk parts together. At the end of the twenty minute interview, she had built them a television. To their surprise and delight, it actually worked when they plugged it into the mains.

Shortly after, Rosie Doe was given a scholarship deal at Oxford University. She had no money and no home, so they provided her with both.

Years later, when she had left university, the television she had assembled out of fraying wires and cork board was still in the Science Professors' lounge. When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, the gathered professors watched the giant leap on the small screen, which had started broadcasting in colour the same moment the BBC had, no adjustment necessary, some years before. Although they hadn't known it when it had been made, the television had been years too advanced for its time.

000

One day, whilst still at university (though by then she had been doing a bit of teaching as well as learning), Rosie Doe had met Jimmy Evans.

He had been raised on a farm, but his parents had recently died, and he had sold the place on to get money for his degree. He sat in some of Rosie's mathematics lectures, and had to make twice as many notes as she did to understand the topics properly. He wasn't a _natural_, nor was he _brilliant_, but he was good enough, and very kind to almost everyone. When university was over, he was going to be an accountant, he said, and move to London to find more work.

Rosie wasn't interested in accounting, or London, but she was very interested in Jimmy Evans, so she married him and left the university when he did.

000

They ended up in a small house nowhere near London, close by to a place called Spinner's End. Rosie intended to put her four degrees to good use, but instead she gave birth to a daughter, who looked identical to her father.

"What should we call her?" Jimmy asked, as they both leaned over her crib, staring in at the baby. "You know, I can't think of anything. I think boy's names are more my sort of thing."

"Boy's names?" Rosie repeated. "Why, what would you have called her if she was a boy?"

"James," Jimmy said at once. "You know, after the actor James Dean?"

The red headed woman had just looked at him for a long moment. "You're joking. After him? Aren't you a little old to like James Dean movies?"

He looked a little embarrassed. "Alright, alright, it's not as if she's a boy anyway. But there's nothing wrong with the name James you know."

"I'm sure," Rosie demurred. "How about Susanna?" she then suggested, thinking of her husband's mother, who he spoke of often.

"Oh, I don't think so," Jimmy said. "It's alright but… Well, I hope she grows up brilliant like you." The two shared a smile. "All those things you think of… What was your mother's name?"

The question was out of the blue, and Rosie had to stop to think about it. A feeling of vertigo struck her for a moment, and the whole world just felt _wrong_. Then it passed, and Rosie was able to say, "…Violet, her name was Violet."

In the end, Rosie had two children, both girls, which meant Jimmy never had the chance to name a boy after James Dean after all. Instead, they were both named after flowers, as Jimmy assumed it was tradition in Rosie's family, and they became Petunia and Lily Evans.

000

When Petunia Evans was eleven, she built a television out of spare parts in her mother's garage.

Rosie and Jimmy were delighted, and the television took pride of place in the kitchen forever after, where the family would sit together every morning and have breakfast, whilst cartoons played on the screen.

Lily wanted to make one too. Petunia tried showing her how, but maybe nine was just too young, and she couldn't quite do it.

000

When Lily Evans turned eleven, she got an acceptance letter from an unusual school up in Scotland.

Rosie and Jimmy were delighted, and they framed the letter and put it up in the kitchen along with Petunia's junior science trophies, though they had to take it down when visitors came by. It hung there forever after, though except at holidays only Petunia, Rosie and Jimmy were sat around the kitchen table to see it.

Petunia wanted to go to that school too. Lily tried to show her how magic worked, but whatever was wrong with Petunia was just _too _wrong, and she couldn't do it at all.

000

During the girls' fourth year at school, the whole family spent Christmas together.

Just like in the old days the family was gathered in the kitchen all together. Petunia was writing out university math equations in a notebook, whilst planning how to style her hair for the new year's party she was going to. Lily was wrapping a present for a boy called Severus, who lived down at Spinner's End, and went to school with her. Rosie was alternating between boiling a pan of peas and quickly dicing up carrots, and her husband was sat with a big book of figures and a pen at the table.

"Mum," Lily asked quite suddenly, "was anyone in your family a witch?"

Rosie stopped chopping carrots, her focus turning inwards for a long moment. At first she thought, _I don't remember_, except that almost immediately after this thought formed she found herself saying, "Oh no, definitely not."

Lily looked disappointed at the answer.

"You're a one of a kind," Jimmy told his daughter with a brilliant smile.

Petunia scowled and rubbed out her lines of equations, which explained how space craft could travel to the moon on half the power they currently used.

That same night, Rosie went outside and stood looking up at the stars. There was something important she knew she should remember, except that she didn't. And the sky had no answers for her either.

After a while, the cold air made her back ache. She was getting old, and she didn't like that thought at all. It just seemed _wrong_. And though she supposed no-one really liked getting old, she thought she liked less than most.

000

After Petunia finished her schooling, a dozen universities headhunted her for their science departments. Rosie was so proud as she shifted through the pile, and she paid special attention to the one from Oxford University, whilst smiling at the television set Petunia had made out of a few spare parts from the garage. Its screen was flat, unlike the bulky boxes other people bought from the shops. In the twenty-first century, when flat screen TVs finally became available for the public, Petunia would scoff and inwardly think she had made one at eleven, years ahead of its time.

000

Petunia never answered any of the letters.

She met Vernon Dursley instead, at a nightclub in town. He was nervous and kept spilling his drink when she talked to him. He was going straight into work, like his father before him, and he had been accepted into a small business that made and sold drills. He was a pencil pusher- he worked with numbers and added up costs or took them away- rather than working on the factory floor. He told Petunia a lot of people liked him because they knew he would be able to fire them someday.

Petunia wasn't interested in drills, or costs, or factory employees, but Vernon Dursley was very interested in her, so they eventually got married and they moved away to Surrey.

They bought a posh, normal-looking house and Petunia filled it with modern conveniences and nice curtains, but she left all of her science trophies behind at her parent's house.

000

When Lily Evans finished school, she sat down and began to apply for work at a number of charm's research facilities. She showed application forms to her mother, who didn't really understand how important they were, and continued to wash up as Lily went through the pile by herself.

Petunia's television was on as Lily compiled a portfolio to show to them, and she even included her own theoretical research on a new charm for time turners she had been working on for the past two years.

She was interrupted twice- once by her mother's excitement as a letter arrived for Petunia from Oxford; the second time by James Potter arriving to take her out on a date.

000

Lily never got to send any of her letters.

She was asked to join the Order of the Phoenix shortly afterwards, along with her boyfriend James Potter and some of his friends. There was a war going on, and Lily knew she would have to help fight with the rest of her people. Everywhere she turned, people were dying or disappearing.

Then one day James Potter asked her to marry him and she accepted. It wasn't the smart decision to make, but it felt like it was the right one.

She moved into Godric's Hollow with James, so she didn't have to go home and risk putting her parents in danger. She sent them a letter about the wedding, but didn't visit, which meant she never got to see how pleased her father was about having a son-in-law called James. During the day she worked at the Ministry; at night she helped organise guerrilla campaigns like the ones in Vietnam only a few years ago, except that they were the good guys, so they couldn't kill anyone.

(Except for the people they did kill, of course.)

000

After that, Rosie and Jimmy didn't see much of their children anymore. They were both old by then, and soon retired. Jimmy only did accounting for their next-door neighbour now- a single mother who couldn't balance her bills for toffee.

They spent their days relaxing, visiting the country so Jimmy could look at cattle, like those his family had used to own. It was obvious now that he had never enjoyed his work as much as he had enjoyed helping out on his parent's farm, although he had never said anything about it to Rosie, or anyone else for that matter. There was less risk and more money in accounting, anyway.

That day in particular, their car was parked at the side of the road, and they were stood on a grass verge looking into a field full of Jersey cows.

"Do you ever regret marrying me?" Jimmy asked suddenly.

Rosie was silent.

She could have done all sorts of things. She could have been a full-time science professor at Oxford, she could have worked in an experimental research facility for the Government, she could have become a doctor. There had been offers. Instead she had been a housewife. She made dinners and beat the dust off curtains. She had two daughters, but neither of them talked to their parents, for various reasons. And on the weekends they drove to the rapidly shrinking green belt around London and looked at cows.

On the way home they were both killed in a car crash. The car flipped several times before it stopped, and both Rosie and Jimmy were suspended upside down by their seatbelts. Jimmy was already dead, but Rosie wasn't quite there yet.

For one floating moment she groped for her pocket watch, which she wore still on a chain around her neck. Her fingers brushed over the cold metal and she felt it pulse in response. There was a din of noise in her head, and the image of stars and space as far as she could see. And for a brief moment at the end of her life she remembered looking into the Schism long ago and being awed by that brief glimpse of forever. _Open it, open it-_

Then Rosie let go of the pocket watch. Instead, she reached down and found one of Jimmy's hands. She gripped it tightly.

"No," she said. At last. "Of course not."

She was happy.

000

After the death of their parents, the last time Petunia Dursley and Lily Potter saw each other was when they went to sort out the remaining personal affects at their parent's house. The house itself would be sold, and the money split. Anything else they were free to take or dispose of as they wished.

Lily went into the kitchen and took down her acceptance letter, still in its little glass frame on the wall. She noticed Petunia's old trophies were already gone, and assumed her sister had taken them.

Petunia had put them in the bin whilst Lily was upstairs, looking at old photograph albums. Shortly after the television in the kitchen had joined them. There was no room for any junk in the house she and Vernon shared.

She watched Lily making the finishing touches to a box of items she was taking with her. They were both stood in the kitchen, in the midst of an awkward silence both were trying to ignore. When Petunia looked her younger sister over critically, she noticed that she had a small bump about her stomach. It was obvious she was going to have a baby in a few months.

Petunia's own bulge was much more pronounced- she was a couple of months ahead.

"The furniture is going to a charity shop," Petunia told her. "I've asked them to come in the morning."

"Alright," Lily agreed.

Petunia hesitated. There wasn't anything here she wanted, except for one thing, but she hadn't been able to find it. All her life, Rosie Evans had worn a pocket watch on a silver chain around her neck. Petunia wanted it now. She wasn't quite sure why, except that she thought it should be hers. As a young child she had grown up grabbing for it with grubby hands whenever she saw it dangling around her mother's neck.

She looked at Lily again. She might know where it was. And she was sure that if she asked, Lily would give it to her.

"Are you done already?" Lily asked her.

Petunia answered. "…Yes."

She was a person who might have had the stars. But with that her last chance passed and went.


	2. Harry

2: Harry

Harry Potter was born at the wrong time.

That wasn't to say he was born early or late, or whilst his parents were in a posh restaurant or taking in a West End show. In fact, he was born very quickly on the 31st of July, at about half past eleven, almost exactly to the date the midwife had predicted, and the only thing his birth had disturbed was a teatime ham sandwich.

Unfortunately for Harry, it was wrong in a number of other ways. Although neither he nor his parents were aware of it, a child born at the end of July had been mentioned in a prophecy. Prophecies are not particularly rare, anyone with a bit of a third eye can _see_ things. As a result, some prophecies are very boring, and feature nothing more important than warnings about ladders and paint buckets on the day of a job interview.

There are others, however, that are infinitely more important, and considerably more dangerous.

And it was because of this that Harry's parents were murdered in flashes of green light not long after his first birthday, and how he found himself left on the doorstep of a painfully normal looking house in Surrey that very same night.

Petunia Dursley, formerly known as Petunia Evans, lived with her husband and son in that very house in Surrey. To her neighbours, she was a source of juicy gossip on happenings both local and international; to her husband, she was his beloved wife and homemaker, although her sister's side of the family left a lot to be desired. Her name only meant something _particularly_ spectacular to a few people in the scientific community, who kept a hold of old papers on theoretical space travel, which they occasionally used in quotes as they went on to write newer and better theories as the years went by. Surrounded by this new lifestyle of hers however, Mrs Dursley forgot many of her previous concerns, worries and fears. She hadn't thought of science, or Oxford, or stars and space in many years. As she was now, they were nothing to her but a dark, unnecessarily messy past which was better left alone.

Then, that morning in October, she discovered her year-old nephew laid on her doorstep next to her milk-bottles. Her first reaction had been to scream in surprise at the unusual find; this was quickly followed by the need to bring the baby inside, before he finished turning the unhealthy shade of purple the cold, night air had started.

But then her next thought had been an odd explosion of _emptiness_, which comes when one suddenly feels too much at once, as her eyes fell on the oddly familiar script written on the letter which accompanied the baby.

Petunia Dursley discovered two things that morning, aside from her nephew. The first was that her sister was dead.

The second was that she had never stopped hating magic, after all.

000

Dudley Dursley was a boy who looked almost identical to his father in every way. He was named after his grandfather, a name much approved of by both his father Vernon and _his_ sister Marge. Petunia Dursley had nodded in agreement from her hospital bed, remarking only that it seemed a solid, sensible name but giving no other sign of either approval or dismay at the naming.

Harry Potter was also a boy who looked identical to his father in every way. At least, that was what his Aunt Petunia told everyone, and nobody had ever met any of Petunia's family (save for herself) to either prove or disprove this fact. Where the name Harry came from was anybody's best guess, but it was dismissed as a common, uninspired name by Petunia and Vernon Dursley both.

Dudley Dursley and Harry Potter grew up together in the same house. They were cousins, although they looked nothing alike, and acted completely different from each other. They could have been friends, as close as brothers had they been raised that way, but instead they became enemies, of a sort, and disliked each other immensely.

When they both began to take their first steps, a feat to which Harry rose better than Dudley, Dudley would strike the back of Harry's knees so he fell over. Or, if Harry had a toy he wanted to play with, Dudley was known to hit him across the head with his rattle so hard the younger boy saw stars. This was to distract him long enough for his cousin to steal the toy away. If nothing else, in those early years Dudley showed a great talent in hitting people, which would aid him greatly later on in his life. His parents applauded this behaviour rather than made any effort to discourage it and, as a result, Dudley's behaviour became more and more deplorable. Sometimes it even managed to try his parents, although they never displayed this to the boy himself.

Instead, they became stricter and colder towards their nephew, who picked up a habit of blending into the background whenever possible. Though Vernon and Petunia Dursley never hit Harry like his cousin did, the older he got the more aware he became, and he started to notice the amnosity behind their odd looks, and the fact that he only had a cupboard to sleep in, whilst Dudley got two bedrooms all to himself. (His cousin _was_ a large boy, but he wasn't quite large enough that he needed _all_ of that room.) The weight of their dislike fell on Harry heavily, and because no one else ever seemed to treat him any different, not even the neighbours or the other children at nursery, he came to accept that it was just something about himself which made other people hate him.

If Petunia Dursley had been honest with herself, she would have noticed that Harry was most similar to how she had been as a child. But Petunia hadn't been honest with herself in years, and her mind saw no use in changing that founding wall of her being right then.

000

When Dudley and Harry began to go to school proper, meaning that numbers and letters became more important than crayon pictures of families holding hands, Dudley's mother was disappointed to learn that her son seemed to have inherited his father's brain as well as his looks. That was to say, he would fail in his classes unless he could beat up a smaller child to do some of the work for him.

Harry however, not wishing to be punished by his teachers for failing, always worked extremely hard, and the material came to him easily and quickly. He found no joy in it however, as he set about rote learning what was necessary to avoid a spanking and a week locked in the cupboard under the stairs.

Unfortunately, avoiding this meant he became one of the smaller children Dudley liked to beat up. It was one of those no-win situations Harry had come to take for granted in life.

000

When Harry was six he saw his Aunt Petunia do something amazing.

Before this, his aunt had only ever been a nemesis of his, the tall overseer who criticised his effort at completing his chores, and who would seize him by the arm and push him into his cupboard.

For one shining moment in Harry's childhood however, his Aunt Petunia was someone spectacular.

It wasn't anything exceptional. She didn't disarm a bomb, or save a life, or cure cancer. She didn't even do something she considered difficult. One day, Harry walked into the kitchen and saw his Aunt Petunia fixing the washing machine with only a rag of cloth and a spanner. Five minutes after she had taken the back panel off she was screwing it back on, looking nonchalant about the whole thing, as if it had been easy and simple.

Harry, of course, knew it couldn't have been. For the last week the washing machine had been spitting water out all over the floor from every cable and door it could, and Uncle Vernon had had to call for a repair man twice. Unfortunately, his blustering and yelling over the phone hadn't gone down very well, and a repair man had still to show up.

Except that now it _was_ fixed. Harry knew better than to ask how that was possible, but it didn't stop him from thinking about it.

And Aunt Petunia was loading up the washing machine as if it had never been a problem, and the clothes were coming out clean clean clean.

000

For about a week afterwards, Harry wanted to be a scientist. Or an inventor. Or even a repairman. For a while he also considered being a housewife, which he had heard people call his aunt, but decided he didn't fancy being married to a house.

He followed his aunt's example, and started collecting spare parts, which she put in tins and said were for Uncle Vernon (although they must have both known the truth of that deep down). Though he knew next to nothing about science, past that gravity made tennis balls fall on your head, and a shoe scuffing along the ground was called friction, and had never heard the words 'engineering' or 'electronics' before, the more he looked at certain parts, the more they seemed to fit together in certain, obvious ways. If a person looked hard enough, there were invisible links between certain things, almost as if they had all been preselected to join those ways.

And one afternoon, as he finally began to assemble all the pieces, he thought he could see the final product in his mind's eye. It was just unfortunate that, at that same time, his Aunt wanted him to go out and prune the flowers in the garden, and sweep the driveway. She threw open the cupboard door, and both she and Harry froze, staring at the parts which were half way to being spun together into _something_-

After that day, Harry never wanted to be a scientist, or an inventor, or even a repairman ever again.

As for Petunia Dursley, the only thing she felt was betrayed.

Harry Potter had no doubt inherited his parent's unnaturalness, but for some reason he also seemed to have inherited something only Petunia should have had. And, after her, her son Dudley.

Staring at the half finished object in her nephew's hands, she demanded in no more than a whisper, "What are you doing?" And he stared at her in surprise and without any comprehension of what he had done wrong. "You… You can't do it," she said, and one of her hands shook, ever so slightly, at her side. "You can't do it! You can't do it!" And then she was yelling, and reaching into the cupboard-

-And he dropped the pieces with a noisy clatter as she shook him by the collar, and they smashed on the floor.

Just as suddenly, she let him go, and he fell back against the cupboard wall, his eyes wide and green like Lilys, like her mothers.

"Don't touch anything," she told him. "Just don't touch anything." She wasn't angry now, she was just empty. "You… can't do that."

Then she sent him outside to do the gardening, and when he was outside she got down on her hands and knees to clean away the parts and pieces, throwing them all in the bin as if they had never existed.

(And although what he had been building was never finished, Petunia thought somewhere in the back of her mind that it probably would have been brilliant, and years too advanced for its time.)

000

The next few years were normal.

Privet Drive was like a world unto itself, wrapped in that normalcy as if it were a shield that the outside could not penetrate. There were a few instances of _strangeness_, but they passed quickly enough, and life continued for Petunia Dursley as it had ever done.

As the summer of 1991 approached however, she felt a growing sense of unease, like eyes were following her around everywhere she went. Or everywhere that _he_ went.

Her husband was confident; he scoffed at the idea that anybody he had had a hand in raising could turn out to be anything less than perfect, but Petunia knew. _She knew._ There was a world out there, dark and unfathomable- a place she could not go, did not _want_ to go (she told herself). Sooner or later it would reach out once again and ruin her life, in the form of her sister's son.

000

When Harry turned eleven, he found out that magic was real.

Even if a person only turns eleven once, for many people that age is not particularly significant. Yet in this instance, the opposite proved true for Harry, for many reasons. The first of these was that he celebrated it in a small shack in the middle of the ocean, until a ridiculously tall man named Hagrid came to retrieve him. The second reason was that this man told him the one thing that would change his life forever.

"You're a wizard, Harry."

As he heard the words, a shiver slipped down his spine like a promise.

000

The next day (or, in actual fact, the very same day) Hagrid took Harry to visit Diagon Alley.

It was the first time in Harry's life that his days no longer blurred together in long, unchanging monotony. Before his eyes, a world of colour suddenly appeared, in the form of a whole maze of streets hidden in the heart of London, bustling with wizards and witches.

Their first stop was at the wizarding bank Gringotts, where Harry's parents had allegedly left him a small fortune. To be honest, Harry hadn't been able to imagine owning anything that the Dursleys hadn't had their hands on first. However, the goblins guarding it had probably been a deciding factor in his family having left it well enough alone.

It had been hard for him to hide his surprise when the vault had opened to reveal heaped piles of gold coins and old heirlooms- medieval looking weaponry, and odd piles of books. There was very little order to any of it, reminding him of some sort of pirate's hoard. That only added to how impressive it looked however, and Harry wasn't able to anything but stare at it all with open-mouthed wonder.

_Seventeen silver Sickles to a golden Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, _the young wizard repeated to himself, as he picked up handfuls of coins and shoved them into a sack the goblin had given him. Seeing him so occupied, Hagrid turned to talk to Griphook the goblin again, leaving Harry to his own devises.

He wandered off amongst the stacks, examining odd things which stood out with a child-like curiosity that he had never been allowed to display at the Dursleys. He pulled at the handle of a gem-encrusted sword, causing a cascade of gold coins- _Galleons_, he reminded himself- to fall around his feet. Sliding it out of its ostentatious sheath, he swung it a few times, enjoying the sound it made, as if it was cutting the very particles of the air in two.

As he was doing this, a glimmer caught his eye. It was a very peculiar glimmer, but then it would have to be to stand out from the rest of the glittering gold. Putting the sword down, Harry turned to look more closely at what it was that now fixated his attention.

Towards the far back of the vault, in an odd sort of gloom, there was a single pedestal. It was unusual in that there were few other stands placed in the vault for display items, like this one had been. Obviously, it held something considerably more precious than any of the other objects contained in the vault, though never in his life would Harry have thought there could have been something worth more money than the sword he had just been swinging around.

On the stand there was a simple piece of jewellery. It looked like a normal pocket watch, save that it was decorated with very intricate patterns on the front and there was just something _odd _about it, though he was unable to put his finger on just what that might be. Unable to help himself, Harry reached out a hand to it, running his fingers over the engraved metal. His arm shivered as he did so, as if a shock of some sort had run up his arm.

He lifted it of its podium and it fitted perfectly in his palm, the small chain it was attached to running down the back of his hand. He tugged at the front to try and see the clock face he knew must be there, but the cold metal did not budge under his hands.

"'Arry!" came Hagrid's voice. "'Arry, we 'ave to go now!"

Snapping out of the daze he had fallen into, Harry quickly shoved the pocket watch into one of the large pockets on the hand-me-down trousers he was wearing. "Coming!" he called as he emerged from behind the piles of gold.

Griphook shot him a suspicious look as they climbed back into the cart, but Harry met his gaze evenly. Under normal circumstances, there was no way Harry would have dared to take the watch without asking if he could first, and the warning from the front of the bank played through his mind briefly, but he shrugged all of that aside.

From the moment he had first laid eyes on the watch he had just _known_ it was meant to be his.

A gruff question from Hagrid drew the goblin's attention away from him. "Don't s'pose there's a way we can go a bit slower?"

"No," snapped Griphook. _"One speed only."_

000

There are some things, of course, that cannot be foreseen by any seer or fortune teller.

Through chance, or luck, or even misfortune, sometimes people find themselves in the middle of something with no idea how they got there.

Any one of the Evan's family might have inherited their larger-than-life ancestry. It could have been a generation far in the future that stumbled across it. At one point in time, it had almost fallen to Petunia Evans.

But in the end it happened to Harry.

000

Harry Potter was no one special before he discovered magic.

Yet, suddenly, he was some sort of hero that even adults seemed to respect for some odd reason. For Harry, the whole thing was a little bit ridiculous, and very embarrassing. It also worried him a little because people were obviously expecting him to be some sort of magical prodigy, when Harry hadn't even known it existed before he received his acceptance letter.

It was only the first time he managed to complete a magic spell himself that he began to feel that he might really belong there.

He was sat with Ronald Weasley, another Gryffindor the same age as him, and they were trying to transfigure matches into needles. Professor McGonagall wanted them all to be able to perform the magic by the next day, which had prompted all the Gryffindor students who hadn't managed it already to club together to practice. They were all seated around the large fireplace in the common room, with the exception of Seamus Finnegan, who had blown up his matchsticks several times already, and it had been unanimously decided by the rest that he didn't need to be close to any more fire than was strictly necessary.

"She said to imagine it," Ron complained, "but I've been looking at this thing for so long I can't see anything _but_ matches! It's bloody useless!"

Harry stared at the match on the chair arm, squinting at it so hard the lines softened and blurred, and the brown of the wood could have just been another golden stitch in the chair fabric.

"Yeah," he agreed with Ron, even though he wasn't as frustrated as the other boy. He didn't want to insult Ron if he didn't have to because Harry thought the two of them might almost be friends.

(He had never had friends before.)

Sometimes things wanted to change. A match into a needle.

Somehow, he was managing to make friends with the people around him. Whatever had been wrong with him before must have been mending itself without him even noticing. Harry had no idea how to be somebody's friend- occasionally he wondered if he was doing it right, but oddly enough nobody ever complained about it.

Harry let his eyes come back into focus. And the next moment there was a needle sitting on the chair arm next to him, both sharp and silver and perfectly shaped.

"Brilliant, Harry! You did it!" Ron looked both impressed and envious. "Will you tell me now, mate?"

000

Like a match into a needle, only slower.

Harry only became aware of the changes to himself because of the words '_E__rised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi'. _The first and last times he saw The Mirror of Erised were the starting points of what was to follow- a final transfiguration.

The first time Harry saw the mirror he was looking for a place to hide. Yet through the mirror the empty room he ducked into was filled with people, including his mother and father.

His heart was pounding excitedly, even though an odd ache beat out a matching rhythm there as well. He scanned over all the figures closely; he had no idea how the mirror knew what his family looked like when he himself was seeing them now for the very first time. Well, there was perhaps a single exception.

An elderly woman and man were stood quite closely behind the woman Harry thought of as his mother, and he thought he recognised them from an old photograph belonging to his Aunt. She had been showing it to his cousin, Dudley, when the school had asked him to do a report on a member of his family. She had introduced them as her parents.

Harry thought that unlike his Aunt Petunia his maternal grandparents looked considerably more friendly to know. The old man was smiling and waving, whilst the woman looked at him with an odd, scrutinising expression, though she seemed pleased with whatever it was she saw in Harry, despite him being dressed in his pyjamas and with his hair all stood on end from having had a cloak over his head (which were two things his aunt always said made a terrible first impression).

Seeing Harry focus his attention on her, one of her hands went up to a pocket in the cardigan she was wearing. As he watched, she drew something out on a chain, and with a start he realised it was the pocket watch he had taken from his vault back in September. He still had it on him, never letting it leave his sight, though he had affixed it round his neck instead on a long chain, so the clunky watch fell down under his robes to rest on his chest. Even now he was wearing it under his pyjamas, and he reached up to pull it out and hold it in his hands as she did. As he watched, his grandmother held the watch in one hand, while the other went to the side of it. In one quick action, she pulled at the front of the watch, and it clicked open easily in her hands.

Harry blinked in surprise, and refrained from doing the same with his own, looking at it with some alarm. What if he broke it?

When he glanced up again however, his grandmother had faded into the back of the frame, and more relatives had pushed to the front, demanding his attention. Looking closely at them all distracted Harry from the mysterious message his grandmother had been trying to impart to him, and in the end he forgot all about it.

The last time Harry saw the Mirror, it was quite some time later, and in a very different place.

"What do you see?" Quirrell demanded, shaking Harry by the shoulder. "What do you _see?_"

Something perfect and impossible.

And his own reflection slipped the Philosopher's Stone into his _real_ pocket.

In the background, his Grandmother was pulling the pocket watch out from under her clothes. This one was fastened round her neck, just like Harry's was, and she held the watch in one hand, and opened it with the other. This time, a blue flair shone out from the watch, before Harry was suddenly being jerked back around by an impatient Quirrell.

"Well boy? Where is the Stone?"

Harry couldn't explain about the watch because he didn't really understand what it was about it that he so desired, and there was no chance that he would reveal that he now had the stone. So he told the man a lie.

"He lies… He lies…" a raspy hiss informed the crazed professor.

And so it was that after eleven years, Harry Potter met Lord Voldemort for the second time.

In the infirmary later, Harry at first had too many visitors to think about what he had seen in the mirror. After talking to Dumbledore, Hermione and Ron, he was finally visited by a crying Hagrid, who blamed himself for Harry being strong-armed into the bed by Madame Pomfrey and strapped down with as many sheets as the nurse thought it would take to make him lie still. The crying giant then presented him with the greatest present he had ever received- a photograph album.

Though there weren't any pictures of his grandparents in the album, it still reminded him of them, and specifically his grandmother, whose actions in the mirror lingered in his mind.

Madam Pomfrey had laid the watch on the bedside table, and Harry had immediately put it back on once he had seen it there. Pulling it out now, Harry turned it over in his hands. _I show not your face but your heart's desire._ Harry wanted his family. He didn't want anything from this watch.

There wasn't a catch, the sides were smooth all round without even a visible hinge. Harry knew that from the many times he had dragged his fingertips over the whorled surface. Yet now that he focused on it clearly, so that the silver with its intricate design was fixed in his mind, when he attempted to open the watch it it did not stick or jam. It flicked open quite easily.

At once, Harry found himself looking at something swirling and gold, and it swallowed him in a wave of power. His eyes widened as he saw something in the very heart of it, odd images which played in front of him. His ears were filled with an odd thumping sound, like the beating of a heart, and it made his whole body hum in time with it.

Then Madam Pomfrey walked in. Startled, Harry slammed the watch closed, pulling it close to his chest in a closed fist. The gold mist which had welled up from inside it immediately dispersed into the air. The nurse didn't seem to notice anything, as she was muttering about Hagrid leaving muddy footprints all over her floor.

After that, there was no time to examine it further, but later- there was always later.

000

The watch was Harry's, and he never feared or questioned it, not even in later years when he might have learned to do both.

Yet it never _did_ anything dangerous, save for fill his mind with flashes of memory, ones that played before him when he sat with the pocket watch open in his cupped hands. It was enticing to stare at, seeing flickers of amazing things happen before his very eyes. What it showed most often was the universe. Not just the galaxy where the Earth was located, but hundreds of others, all with their own planets, suns, moons, asteroids and even black holes. Once, he watched with startled eyes as two galaxies were sucked into a black hole, matter collapsing in on itself amidst a host of fierce explosions- all of which happened soundlessly in the void of space.

There was an odd thrill in watching the things the pocket-watch could show him, but, even more curious than that these things existing within a pocket watch, was that he could understand everything the watch showed him. When he watched the galaxies collapse, he knew _why_ it was happening, knew what was happening to the atoms that were sucked away, and, even weirder, knew where the previous inhabitants had gone.

He never wondered how it was possible. There were so many strange things around him all the time, what was one more?

(He should have known that there was something in that acceptance that was unusual, unnatural.)

For all of that though, the watch might never have come to anything, were it not for one instant which changed everything.

Harry died.

In the wake of the Avada Kedavra curse that destroyed the piece of Tom Riddle's soul hidden inside Harry, there was a moment, a shudder in time. Under normal circumstances, Harry would have appeared before Dumbledore, who would have asked him if he wished to go back or move on- it would have been entirely his choice. After all he had done (walked to his own death to save everyone he cared about), it was the least that he could be given in return. And Harry would have chosen to go back.

Yet now his death triggered something else instead.

The power within the pocket watch pulsed as he fell to the ground, escaping its confines in a brilliant golden-white supernova of colour that filled the clearing and reflected eerily off the bone-coloured masks of the assembled Death Eaters.

Then it consumed him.


	3. The Architect, Part One

PART THREE:  
The Architect, Pt One

"I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?"  
**~ Chuang Tzu**

I.

One night, she woke up screaming in her bed.

She was burning.

Hands grabbed at her shoulders, pushing her down. She fought against it, thrashing and twisting, her hot skin writhing like the flames she had dreamed of. She didn't want to lie down again, to go back down there to where her dreams grew lives of their own. They spoke of the future, and the future was-

"It's alright," he was saying. "It's alright."

But it wasn't.

Her own eyes stared out at her from the flames, and she could feel them looking at her still, even though the dream was over.

(-::-)

He surfaced briefly, burning.

In his head and in his chest, a foreign rhythm of heartbeats sounded out impossibly loud (impossibly strange).

(-::-)

As a student on Gallifrey, there came a time when she was expected to look into the Untempered Schism. It was a formal event- a passage into the life of a Time Lord. To stand at the brink of the eye and look into its heart was to see all of time, in its most raw and unstoppable form. When she was told to Look, to See, she lifted her eyes and met with forever.

That was where she saw it. The image that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

_Time was wild, and it consumed…_

A teacher in the Academy once said something which would become a famous quote. That the people who looked into the Schism could be divided into three groups: those who ran, those who were inspired, and those who were driven mad.

She was never quite sure whether she had been driven mad or not.

_Time would consume all the universe._

Everything she did forever after was marred by a burning presence, which stared out from behind her eyes. It felt like there was a hot flame eternally burning there and, every now and again, she would even catch a faint smell of something smouldering away.

_It was only a matter of… time._

Some years later, she finished the Academy and was an official Time Lord, by both initiation and education. She had seen into eternity, and now she understood its rules and flows. As had been decided many thousands of years ago, this was how a Time Lord was created.

Like all Time Lords, she went into service to help her people. She became a grand designer, a creator of ships and spiralling towers. All of it going ever upwards. She took a fitting name- she called herself The Architect. As more time went by (although who could say quite how much in this backwardsforwards, a-day-in-a-second sort of existence?) there was little on Gallifrey that she had not personally had a hand in designing in some way. The curves and arches, the dips and the grooves streamed from her mind, and found form outside of electric impulses, always new and wonderful. (Some species said arrogant and boastful. She didn't take it as an insult- all that meant was that she knew her own people.)

She was fixed to the planet by roots made of the strongest, most complex metals in the universe.

Then, there came a whisper.

Then there came a shriek.

There was war on Gallifrey's doorstep, and Time Lords were being cut down on front lines which extended across both the universe and time itself. The great ships were destroyed, even as fast as she helped design _better_ ones- fierce warships in place of streamlined craft for the time vortex. Her own TARDIS- so lovingly grown over a thousand years and more, with visits to the field every other day to watch and keep-an-eye-on-it (even though she never planned to travel anywhere or when in it- space was a dangerous unknown, and time was the greatest destroyer of all)- was finally pressed into battle-regalia so awe-inspiring (_arrogant_) it ought to of frightened their foes into retreat from simply being seen when it arrived into battle.

But The Architect never went into battle.

(-::-)

When he wondered where he was, the part of his mind that sparked and shimmered in ways it never had before answered simply, _TARDIS_.

When he wondered what _TARDIS_ was, there was a part of him that knew, that fought against the part that didn't, and told him, Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. A time ship. A space ship. _His ship_.

"Who are you?" Voldemort had demanded.

The answer was, he didn't know.

(-::-)

He was called the Engineer, and they had been working together for over four hundred years.

(His mind/Her mind/ Their mind said: _Engineer_ was a bad translation for a very complicated Gallifreyan word. In a society as advanced as the Time Lords, there are many types of engineers for many types of machines and devices and ships. In the Gallifreyan language, the word for his name was much more specific than simply, _Engineer_. He died even before he/she/we left Gallifrey, so the importance of his exact name was moot, really, but it was something that did still matter. It _was_ important.

And so: he worked primarily on the time cortex in time ships- the most delicate and important of all parts.)

"Let's get married soon," she said to him one day, a tablet of plans held in her hands. They were both on their knees by the main cortex of her TARDIS, trying to design a system that would be less susceptible to blowing up when a TARDIS sustained too much damage. It would be a great step forward in the war movement. It would save many needlessly lost lives.

"A spring wedding on Venovax," he agreed.

The Engineer loved Venovax- a passion he had inherited from his father in turn. Their lives were wound in the threads of the planet's history, here and there and everywhere. The father had known he would have a son long before he even had a wife, just by reading historic journals. (This sort of behaviour was _not approved of at all_ by the higher ups, and often severely punished, but it went on regardless most of the time by certain individuals. The Time Lords were not quite so removed from their empire-holding roots during the Dark Times as they liked to admit.)

"I'm not travelling all the way to Venovax to have a wedding I'll only have to redo when we get back here," the Architect informed him.

They both knew but didn't say that she wasn't likely to travel anyway, even if marriages amongst 'earlier peoples' _were_ considered legally binding.

They both knew but didn't say that she was likely to go travelling whether she liked it or not because soon enough they would all be conscripted to the front lines.

"All right," the Engineer agreed. "A proper ceremony. Right after we've driven off the last of the Daleks. Err, and- _ah hah_, pass me the sonic spanner, please. You know, after the Ninth State War on Venovax, there was a massive increase in weddings. Thousands and thousands flocked to the Mother Mountain to be married in traditional style, even though they had regular cathedrals every old place. And all the babies a year later! They were all called Maraxim you know, even the boys, after the Queen who won the war!"

The Architect rolled her eyes as if in annoyance. But really she liked hearing about all these things she would never see. She wondered whether the mothers of Gallifrey would take part in a baby boom, or whether the high moral decorum of the place would prevent them from enjoying the peace (a continuing steady stream of clone babies- no booms in any of _those_ systems).

"I wonder who all the babies will be named after on Gallifrey?" Engineer asked, once again almost reading her mind.

"Well, not Engineer, that's for sure," she joked. "It looks like it will take you all the war to rewire that single panel."

"My dear," he said, pushing another wire into place, "even if it takes all the war, your ship will be the safest of all the ones to travel in the Vortex!"

She smiled, and pressed her shoulder next to his as he continued to work. "I should expect so, since I so kindly offered her for testing…"

(-::-)

He started back to himself, as if from a dream, only to find himself in another dream.

The universe was burning. Golden threads of light that were stretched like rail tracks across the vast darkness of space were popping and snapping in the flames. And in the midst of it a figure stood, features cast into darkness despite the brilliance of the fire all around. He _knew_ the figure was staring back at him. There was an insurmountable distance between them: they were stood nose to nose, breathing in the air the other breathed out.

He knew those eyes; they were his.

And so were the flames.

(-::-)

With a war as fierce as the one between the Daleks and the Time Lords, there was bound to be dissent amongst what should be done, and how to win.

Whether they would win.

"You must consider that we might be fighting a losing battle for Gallifrey!" The woman speaking was tall, and her bearing stern and set. Amongst the furious mutterings that surrounded her, she stood unaffected, resplendent in red and gold. She was certain of her words, even if the Council would never acknowledge the validity of the concern.

The Time Lords had remained unchallenged for too long. There was a lot they had forgotten about war.

"We will never abandon Gallifrey! This is our home! If we left it to fall to the Daleks, what would even be the point of continuing the war?" a Time Lord from the crowd spoke up.

"The Daleks are pushing further and further into our territory," the brunette tried once more, a wisp of hair drifting about her face as she glanced around at her fellow Time Lords. "My concerns are very real! If we continue to hold the Crucible so stubbornly, and will not even consider retreating and gathering our forces, then the war for _our people_ is already lost!"

"If we lose the Crucible, the war _will_ be lost!"

The woman shook her head, obviously annoyed. "You must show more concern for the people who cannot fight!" she insisted. "By refusing to even acknowledge that we could lose, we do not take into consideration evacuation plans, escape routes, planets for refugees-"

"It has not come to that!"

"It won't come to that!"

The woman pursed her lips, and allowed herself to be shouted down by a multitude of voices.

Across the grand amphitheatre, her brown eyes met with the Architect's own for a brief second, before the Architect looked away.

That same day, she and the Engineer sat in their bedroom watching news casts before they went to sleep.

"I heard they're planning to call back The Master," Engineer murmured into her ear, from where his chin was resting on her shoulder.

"I thought he hated all us Time Lords," Architect commented, repeating what little she knew about the infamous Time Lord. She wiggled her toes a little, to stop them from falling asleep.

"I'm pretty sure he still does," her almost other half replied, sounding amused. "I'm just not sure we have many other options if we want to hold the Crucible."

The Architect snorted. "I'm sure that's not what Nomara had in mind."

Nomara was a word from the Dark Time of the Universe. It meant soldier.

The Architect still couldn't get used to referring to her sister with such a name. Back before her sister had joined the Academy, a year ahead of herself, she had been a blonde haired, green eyed day-dreamer, who spent a whole summer once doing nothing but weaving red baskets out of river reeds. Now she had brown hair and eyes- a completely different face. There was nothing to indicate that the stern speaker who had stood up before the Time Lords earlier that day had ever been her sister.

"Your sister," the Engineer said. The inflection he put on the words said everything he didn't.

_I don't think she's wrong,_ the Architect wanted to say, but didn't.

That night she dreamed her dream again. Where the universe was burning, and the threads of time themselves that had held the universe up collapsed inwards. Where in the midst of it all a figure stood, features shadowed and obscured, yet with eyes that met her own knowingly. Sensing her fear, and her despair.

She knew those eyes; they were hers.

And so were the flames.

(-::-)

He remembered the face of a smiling woman, framed with red hair and a golden light that made it look as if tiny flames were caged amongst the individual strands. He remembered a man that he now knew he would grow to resemble, though then his eyes had caught on the glasses, which made the brown eyes behind them look smaller than they actually were. He remembered a scream of surprise and biting cold, followed by eleven years of loathing. He remembered…

Some was good. Some was bad.

The glow that had once been another consciousness wanted to rip it apart, scatter it away, and replace it.

But he had fought hard for the best of it, and had suffered through the worst of it. And he would not let it go.

(-::-)

In the end, the 'other options' the Time Lords thought up proved to include a summoning of more people to take to space. A special operation was to take place that would hopefully wipe out the Daleks for good, and would ensure the safety of the Crucible.

The Engineer was one of them.

He had frowned at the summons on his tablet for a long while, even as the Architect stood nearby and chewed at her bottom lip. When he finally looked up, he smiled at her expression, "I'll be back soon. We'll get married after I've saved the day, and count how many babies get named after me. I think about four hundred and fifty-seven would be a good number, don't you? A whole generation of Engineers."

As ridiculous as ever.

"I don't think you'll get to fifty-seven."

"Maybe not, maybe not," he agreed, but with one eyebrow raised. "The Master is going on this little trip after all. I hear _he's_ going to save the day this time. Though how many children do you think parents will want to give _his_ name to? I'm not worried. Do I look worried…"

There was no wedding.

The news came back: all dead.

(And The Master fled, though no one knew _that_.)

After that, The Architect received her summons as well.

(-::-)

A TARDIS was a ship that could travel through all of time and space.

A Time Lord was- There was no exact definition.

The Architect was a Time Lord.

And Harry was The Architect.

(-::-)

The fighting was taking place close by now. Through the observatories on Gallifrey it was possible to see the flashes of light that indicated pitched battles were taking place almost constantly. News holograms became long, scrolling lists of the dead, Time Lords and civilian Gallifreyans alike. The Academy pushed up its learning schedule significantly. Students could go in and see the Schism that week and understand all there was to know about Time another week later. Yet there still weren't enough soldiers.

This was the reality of war.

Time would consume even the Lords of Time themselves. The Architect was sure of that now.

Even though she had always remained fixed, never using her ability to travel through time, turning herself to creating fixed points on the planet she had hoped to never leave, she had never managed to escape from the burning impression left on the back of her mind by looking into the Untempered Schism. Of something terrible. Of something in her own future.

Everyone saw something different when they looked into the Schism. Not everyone saw their own future, as the Architect had. The image had flashed through the time stream before her. Burning. Something burning. Though she hadn't physically seen herself, she had known it was her, the black figure solid against the wavering flames. Everything burning.

Not long before the Architect was due to leave for the front lines (protecting the Crucible, again), Nomara came to visit.

They hadn't spoken much since the death of their parents, since Nomara had gone to fight her battles and changed her face (three times, or maybe four); maybe it had even been before that, when the Architect had looked into the Schism and started dreaming. Or maybe even as early as when her sister had looked into forever and lost her name. After looking into the Schism, a Time Lord lost their name, a sort of natural time lock that removed it from existence, lifted them above Time as others knew it (helped along by Time Lord science). After her sister had looked into the Schism, the name had disappeared from the Architect's mind, leaving only emptiness where memories had previously sounded out the word. Yes, probably they had started drifting apart even then. All those months without a word for her sister, who seemed pleased even when the Architect was upset, because the Schism had left something else behind instead, and her sister had just been looking for a way to say what it was. (Nomara. Nomara. Soldier.)

The face her sister now wore naturally suited itself to grave expressions. When she appeared at Architect's workshop, she was frowning, her eyebrows drawn down in sharp lines, following the unhappy curve of her mouth.

"Architect," she said.

It sounded so formal. The Architect wanted to tell her sister the name that had been taken from her, but could not.

"Nomara," she said in return.

Brown eyes scanned the metal work-benches, which bore a merger of planning tablets, small metal models, mock up TARDIS cortexes, and boards of equations for block transfer mathematics. Husband and wife, almost.

The meeting was awkward, and over almost as soon as it had begun. They had exchanged pleasantries, and Architect had offered her refreshments and been turned down. She wondered whether Nomara had gotten what she came for, whatever that had been.

The next day, the Architect walked amongst the tall buildings, the roots that tied her to this planet, and looked skywards to the great dome that covered the city. And beyond it, the rest of the universe, which nightly now she dreamed of burning.

_I must not,_ she thought. _If I do, then somewhen, somehow I-_

"Architect," Nomara said. "Do you have a moment?"

(-::-)

Harry Potter sat up, heaving a breath into his lungs as if it was the last one he would ever take. Two hearts pounded in his chest, beating out a quick four beats over and over. His limbs shook, just a little, and his head felt stuffed and muddled, though the problem was clearing. New impulses in his brain began firing, old and new interacting.

Above his head, a modified (safer) TARDIS column stood silent. Waiting.

II.

There is a lot that he doesn't understand about time. About how things which happened a million, million years ago can also have just occurred five minutes back, or are scheduled to happen half an hour from now (whenever _now_ actually is). Or how time can't be measured by any one standard, because a day on earth is a year somewhere else, and in some places hasn't even been 'invented' yet.

So earth time is the first thing that Harry gives up. He acknowledges that it can't be completely linear, and starts to draw it the way the memories in his head show him, which is the best of time that anyone can draw- circles within other circles with lumps and bumps and twisty twirly bits sometimes linking them together (and sometimes not).

He imagines himself and Ginny as two of those circles sometimes, like cogs in a machine, each twirling the other round and round. He can't consider that they might turn out to be two (normal) circles, sat side by side with only one short part of the curve touching the other before they roll apart.

Leaving his own timeline for three days after his 'death', Harry is still able to rejoin it at the exact same moment he left, and battle Voldemort as if nothing had changed- as if the universe hadn't suddenly exploded wide open in his head.

He tries to ignore that when the Elder Wand flies into his hand, it feels cold, and empty.

The second to last thing Harry gives up is magic. This is mostly because he refuses to accept that he has changed so irrevocably that he will never use it the way he once did ever again, even as he gives up on other things one after another and another.

What place does Harry Potter have in the Wizarding World if he can't do magic, after all?

(-::-)

It is a few hours after the final battle that he gives up a second thing. This is something he doesn't mind avoiding much at all; Harry has never enjoyed medical check-ups. Madam Pomfrey proves to be incredibly difficult to avoid however, even when everyone else can be dissuaded with pleas of being tired, and wanting to sleep.

Harry laid in on his bed in the Gryffindor boy's dormitory, and listened to the steady sound of his hearts, with one hand on the left side of his chest and another on the right side. If Madam Pomfrey had cast a diagnosis spell on him then it would not not likely of ended well. Without even meaning to, Harry fell asleep.

The next time he woke up, Ginny was curled up at his side, her head laid on his chest. He stiffened, terrified that she might of heard-

"Mmm," she said, snuggling in a little closer. "You're cold…"

_Not cold_, Harry thought. That would probably be his average temperature from then on.

(-::-)

The fourth thing Harry gave up on doing was being able to look at things without sometimes jumping in surprise. He wasn't the only one who had to adjust to that one, everyone who knew him had to learn to accept that there were times when Harry would over-react to something he saw out the corner of his eye.

The reason for this was that there was a type of glow that Harry could see in those corners. Like neon strip lights that formed burning lines over everything he saw. It had taken him a long time to get used to it being there, and every now and then they still caught him unawares.

They even appeared in his dreams.

Whilst he slept, it was as if the entire universe unravelled in front of him. There were millions and billions of stars shining under his eyelids, and he could travel to any of them he wished. And amongst the stars there were the glowing threads, like a web that linked every little bit together with every other thing and place.

A web of time.

And some of the bits were set firm, fixed and inevitable, and other bits were loose, as easy to move and shake down as cobwebs.

And if he slept for long enough at night, he would see herself somewhere in the middle, marked by a thousand threads which went in all directions. But nearly all of them were loose, and as silvery and delicate as glass. A single wrong move and the whole lot would shatter, leaving him drifting with only the dullest threads remaining. Just looking at them made his heart pound with terror, and he knew he had to do something, change something, _be_ something-

When he was awake, the threads mostly wrapped themselves around people. Hundreds of off-shoots would stream off from each person, tying them to each other, to people they had yet to meet, and their thousand and one different futures.

He knew from the memories of the Architect _what_ he was seeing, though few Time Lords experienced it the way that he did. He supposed that made him special, but rolled his eyes the first time he actually thought that.

People come to believe it though, even though they're not quite sure in what ways Harry is special (aside from defeating Voldemort, of course). The time-lines he can see around people and events give him fore-knowledge of a lot of things, when he begins to understand better just what it is he is seeing. They let him rescue people, avoid dangerous situations as he works as an Auror, and even help him know when an umbrella would be a good item to carry to work with him.

But even with this advantage, which really means Harry _has_ gained something from becoming a Time Lord, he doesn't think he is wrong when he stands by the one simple belief about his transformation he inherited from the Architect:

Time is all about loss.

The last thing Harry gives up is his family.

(-::-)

They were living in a little flat over on Galleon Street in Diagon Alley when Harry first realised what that meant. For him. For her.

Her- Ginny.

Harry was in the Auror training program, just entering his third year. Kingsley Shacklebolt, the new (and considerably improved) Minister, had offered him an early promotion the previous year, from Junior to Senior Auror. Harry had turned it down. He had said he wanted to earn his way up the ladder like everyone else, regardless of what had happened in the past. (What did it matter if the reason was a lie?)

Ginny had been both exasperated and so proud she had practically glowed.

"I've got such a brilliant, modest man as my boyfriend," she had said, only half jokingly, before pulling him in for a snog. When they broke apart and she saw Harry smiling at her goofily, she had promptly punched him in the arm. Hard. "You should have taken the promotion, you prat."

Harry was twenty-three.

It was a week before Ginny's birthday, and Harry was getting breakfast ready that morning, whilst mentally planning what there was still to prepare for the surprise party he and the rest of the Weasley family were planning to throw for her. It was hard work- Ginny had inherited the Weasley prankster deviousness (which Molly swore was from Arthur, and to which Arthur just raised his eyebrows in his wife's direction meaningfully) and made it near impossible to plan any surprises which she couldn't ferret out before hand.

Ginny wearily wandered into the small kitchen, and flopped onto one of the wooden chairs around the breakfast table. Harry smiled at her cheerfully, before serving the fry-up he had prepared to lure her out of sleep, and sitting down in the chair next to her.

It wasn't long before she brought up the topic Harry had been hoping to avoid- the birthday in question.

"So," she asked, a mischievous gleam in her eye. "What _have_ you got planned for next Tuesday then?"

Harry tried for ignorance. It had worked in his favour before. "Next Tuesday? Well, I think I've got a training session in Scotland that day. You know, trekking through miles of bog-land and hunting for more banshees… Like last Tuesday, really."

She mock scowled at him and gestured in his direction with the knife in her hand. "You better not be, Potter. If our shower gets filled with bog reeds again I'll have you strung up by your toes. Mum'll probably help. She raised six boys, she'll understand my pain."

Harry pretended to consider her threat. "I think I'll take my chances. Some of those banshees are real lookers you know."

The red haired witch laughed out loud. "You're the right sort of person to tame a banshee to be his girlfriend, Mr Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived!"

He smirked. "Who's to say I haven't already?"

Ginny yelped in out-rage and slapped his arm. "Cheeky bugger!" she declared. "Banshee! That should be beautiful _birthday-girl_ to you, Mr Potter!"

"My beautiful, birthday-girl _banshee_," he agreed, with a mischievous grin in her direction that was belied by the softer emotions shown by his eyes.

She looked at him fondly. "You sap…" she muttered. After a second, she reached out and ran a finger over his curved lips. "You know, it's funny," Ginny said. "If you don't start getting a wrinkle or two here, people will start to think you're dating an older woman."

Harry's smile dipped momentarily before he managed to hold it up under her intense scrutiny. "There's still a few years in me yet before I have to start worrying about wrinkles."

She smiled at his words, but Harry thought it looked just as uncertain as his own.

There was one of the threads that Harry could see between himself and Ginny. Representing their present, it was strong and bright. And when Harry looked to the future, he saw a continuing brilliant thread for Ginny.

It went straight past him and into the distance.

(-::-)

How had the Architect become human?

Harry didn't know, but he spent the next few years longing to find out.

The last memory the Architect possessed before her memories ended and Harry's began, were those words, "_Architect, do you have a moment?"_

After that, there was nothing. Harry only knew her to of been his Grandmother by the Mirror of Erised, and photos he had later wrangled from his Aunt, which pictured her wearing it. Their truce had lasted until Harry had dared to ask, "Your mother… Was there ever, anything… Strange, about her?"

Aunt Petunia's lips had pursed, and her skin turned frighteningly pale. "Get out!" she had said, her voice low to start with. "Get out. Get out, get out, _GET OUT_!" She had risen to a frightening crescendo by the end, which had started Uncle Vernon off as well, until Harry had been driven out the house by their shouting.

Harry had never seen his Aunt like that, except for once a long time ago when Harry had been building something, something fantastic, and she had seen it and-

Time Lords do not age as human beings do. Not even wizards and witches can compete with the time span inherit in their race, even without the ability to regenerate. As time went on, Harry was aware that everyone he knew would be long buried before he even left his twenties. Just the thought of it frightened him, and he tried to ignore it. That was the only other thing he could do, if he could no longer become human.

Oh, he knew the Architect had somehow been put through a Chameleon Arch, but she had no idea how to build one herself, and there wasn't one attached to her TARDIS (why would there be?). The depository of knowledge all Time Lords could access didn't seem to be available those few times Harry tried for it in desperation. The only way Harry could possibly become _himself _again would have been if-

(-::-)

There are thousands of ways of saying something without ever speaking a word.

Even though Harry never heard his friends (his family) say a word about his aging, he knew what they were thinking. Hundreds of different ideas about _what_ and _why_. As more time passed, the less positive those _whatwhys_ became. Not maliciously of course, or even out of jealousy. Harry knew they were worried. There were things he hadn't ever said, that perhaps he should have done, a long time ago.

But now Harry had a plan, and eventually the whole thing would blow over.

"I'll see you later, mate," Ron said, slapping him on the back with a wide grin. "Don't you be late for the party, alright?"

They were just finishing up at their desks in the Auror offices, quite late at night, with the rest of the floor all but deserted save for a few stragglers. As senior staff they had paperwork which stretched over the entirety of their shared office, and probably would have covered even more had Ron not used a compression charm on his and Harry- well…

It was Ginny Weasley's twenty-seventh birthday.

Harry nodded and rolled his eyes. "'Course not," he replied. "I'll be through the Floo ten minutes after you. I've only got to file these last few reports away. But don't _you_ forget to fire-call Neville to tell him it's almost time. He'll get his wife to box your ears if you do, and he ends up wandering in just when we're about to surprise Ginny."

The red head grimaced as he turned to leave. "Like I'd risk that happening. That woman's mad! And Mum would be even worse. Alright, see you later Harry!"

"See you," Harry returned, shuffling a few pages in his hands and turning his attention to the top one.

"Oh, and don't forget your special present," Ron called back. "It's been driving Mum mad that you won't tell her what it is. If you haven't bought something already I suggest you get your arse in gear pretty quickly."

Harry snorted and rolled his eyes. "Whatever Ron, get out of here already!"

He had it all under control. One quick trip, and Harry would have all his problems solved. There was an engagement ring in his pocket, something he knew Ginny had been wanting for ages from him, and tonight he would finally be able to give it to her. All he needed to do was- Well, it was so obvious, he couldn't believe it had taken him so long to work it out!

He was so pleased with his final solution, Harry failed to notice his friend's thread slip away from his as he headed out the door.

After all, he could only see it out the corner of his eye, and Harry was looking… straight forward…

Later, when he finally finished for the night, as Harry walked through the offices, the corridors, and entered the lift, one by one the threads that linked him to the people he worked with dissolved into nothing.

Harry bounced on his heels as he waited for the lift to reach the Atrium. An elderly wizard with a greying moustache leaned close to him and asked, "You seem to be in a good mood tonight, Mr Potter."

Harry turned and smiled at him, recognising him as a member of Mr Weasley's department. "Oh, yes, I suppose I am," he said. "I'm going to ask my girlfriend to marry me!"

The older wizard beamed back. "Well, I must say, good luck to you then!"

Harry exited the lift at the Atrium, and waved goodbye. "Thank-you! Have a good night!" As he did so the thread that linked them slipped away.

Harry hurried towards the Apparition point, though he supposed he could take as much time on this as he needed. He could reappear _when_ever he liked, after all. His plan was very simple- take the TARDIS to Gallifrey, borrow (steal?) a Chameleon Arch, come back to Earth, make himself a wizard again, go to the party, propose to Ginny.

Simple.

.

(But Gallifrey-)

_End Part 3.1_

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(~~::~~)

Happy New Year! I wanted to make my December post estimate, so I split this chapter into two parts. Sorry if there are a lot of unanswered questions in this little bit (so what did Harry do instead of magic, etc?), but I hope you enjoy it anyway.


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